My name is Lee Isaac Chung and I’m the director of “Twisters.” This is a scene that happens about halfway through the movie. Internally, we would always say this is T4, tornado number four, because we number every single one of our tornadoes. And Kate is played by Daisy Edgar-Jones. And then we have Tyler played by Glen Powell. Other interesting actors in this sequence are James Paxton, who is actually Bill Paxton’s son. We only see him very briefly. He’s the man of the couple who is trying to get away from this tornado. No! Stop! And Lily Smith, who is the daughter of our writer Mark L. Smith. And then we have Samantha Ireland, Aila Grey, who is the little girl. And we also had Jeff Swearingen, who plays the hapless receptionist. I really wanted to shoot a nighttime tornado because, growing up in tornado alley, nighttime tornadoes were always the scariest. Actually, the intention of doing this was to create that feeling, that subjective feeling of what it's like to experience a tornado in real time. We had Scott Fisher, who was our special effects guy, who set up a lot of cool things to happen in this scene after we saw the Coke machine fall and I saw the top cover come loose. We set up that top cover to blow away in the wind. Jeff Swearingen was set up to be set up, to be pulled back to the bottom of the pool. And then after he was pulled back, that's where we replaced Jeff with this wonderful stunt actor who we set up to actually be lifted into the air. I think he went up about 60 feet. And then we crashed this trailer into the edge of the pool. As a result, a lot of debris fell down. And this was a little bit scary to film because when the trailer falls on these actors, it's loud, very loud. And I felt like the actors were really very sporting in doing this. We were protecting them, of course, because we were shooting a sequence where the bottom is intact, and then when they come out of this pool, everything is destroyed, we needed to destroy the set. So every time we were shooting inside this pool, there were people outside, our crew, who were destroying the set. So that was happening at the same time that we were shooting all of this inside the pool. The pool had actually never been there. We had found a motel where there were three separate structures inside the motel. And what we did was we built the hotel in a horseshoe shape and we built an office so that we could then destroy those parts of our set so that it looked like a tornado actually flattened a horseshoe-shaped motel. When we walked out with these guys, with the crane, this was really a beautiful shot. I give a lot of credit to Geoff Haley, our incredible camera operator, for all of the technical expertise that he put into this whole sequence to make sure that our camera was level and that all of these moments somehow worked out in this perfect way.
